Fantasy card videogames continue to grow in popularity. These videogames provide electronic representations of a gaming board and playing fantasy cards from players' decks of cards. These games have evolved, including large numbers of fantasy cards available for the players' decks. Each card has unique designs and character properties. The game consists of the sequential playing of cards against other players, card characteristics controlling progress within the game. A popular series of fantasy card videogames are Magic: the Gathering® electronic videogames available from a variety of software developers. These fantasy card videogames seek to electronically replicate real-life card games.
Another growing area in videogame technology is gameplay streaming. Viewers now subscribe to various streaming services and watch gameplay. Current streaming technology is passive, viewers simply viewing the streaming content, maybe providing written or audio comments. For example, a common streaming platform is Twitch® available from Amazon. Other users may engage multiple systems, such as streaming content and talking with friends via Discord® available from Discord, Inc.
Viewers watching the fantasy card videogame streams are currently unable to get additional information about the cards being played at any specific moment within the game. Fantasy card information is further complicated by these games having thousands of unique cards, each with unique features. During a typical game, 50 to 75 of these unique cards are in-play.
One current solution is an administrator or commentator manually entering card information on the in-play cards. The large trove of card information for the large number of game cards and the small subset of card in-play complicates adding this content. This technique is cumbersome, relying on active manual data input. This technique also assumes that the viewer is interested in a very specific subset of digital cards on the screen. The viewer may have different needs or interests on specific cards, for example requesting more detailed information on a specific card.
Another technique is a software application entitled Deckmaster, developed by “Fugiman” and published on the software distribution site GitHub.com. Deckmaster is a streaming application extension displaying image data acquired based on data from the videogame, without intermediate processing. Deckmaster is also extremely limited to including only publicly-available image data from public databases.
This Deckmaster software solution does not include additional processing of the data from the desktop videogame. Moreover, this Deckmaster software solution could not facilitate or support any intermediate processing because it does not collect and process gaming data aside from the image retrieval calls. The Deckmaster software does not track gameplay activity and collect or process player deck information prior to gameplay. The Deckmaster software is an image supplement software, providing stock images for supplementing a streaming feed, but is devoid of collecting and processing gaming data.
Furthermore, the Deckmaster software solution has an unreliable execution, with inconsistent operations based on software variabilities of the gameplayer, the streaming service, the viewer application, and image database availability. Therefore, while Deckmaster seeks image distribution, it provides an unreliable software solution with numerous operational glitches and complications.
As such, there exists a need for supplementing streaming content of fantasy card videogames to include supplemental content for the viewer.